The device could get lighter, certainly, and thinner,
possibly — although you still need space for a power button, a lock button, a
headphone jack, a dock connector and volume controls. (It really doesn’t get
much thinner than the iPod Touch.)

But again, really,
these are incremental improvements. Like the chips on the inside, they’re
always going to be interesting to the Apple cognoscenti — not so much to the
audience at large. We’ll care more and more about iOS 6 and its inheritors; not
so much about the iPhone 6.

That’s why we’re
being teased with the possibility of truly new Apple mobiles, such as the iPad Mini or iTV,
later this year. These are the launches that will remain a big deal — when
Apple, the world’s most obsessively design-minded mass-market company, tackles
an entirely new category.